Advances in DNA testing have allowed forensic scientists to identify three more victims of the terrorist attacks in New York City on 11 September 2001, authorities in Manhattan have confirmed.
The development brings to 1,653 the number of individuals who have been positively identified from the 2,753 who died after al-Qaida terrorists flew two hijacked commercial aircraft into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on that morning.
The names of two of the victims were announced on Thursday afternoon by New York’s chief medical examiner, Dr Jason Graham, almost 24 years after the biggest ever terrorist attack on US soil. The identity of the third newly identified person, an adult woman, was withheld at the request of her family.
Graham named Barbara Keating, 72 in 2001, of Palm Springs, California, and Ryan Fitzgerald, 26, of Floral Park, New York.
Keating was a church worker and retired disability advocate who was onboard American Airlines flight 11 on her way home from a late summer break in Massachusetts. The plane in which she was traveling, a Boeing 767 flying from Boston to Los Angeles with 76 passengers and 11 crew, had been hijacked by the Islamist terrorists and was the first incident in the attack when it was flown directly into the north tower of the skyscraper complex in lower Manhattan at 8.46am ET on 9/11.
A friend of Keating’s, Mary Arthen, parish secretary at St Theresa of the Child Jesus church in Palm Springs where they worked together, said the development was bittersweet. “It brought everything back again from 24 years ago,” she said.
“It was kind of shocking to me that it took so long to identify her. In my head she passed that day. It was just a devastating time for our church, so many people knew her,” she said in a telephone interview on Friday morning.
Arthen said that Keating, a breast cancer survivor, was not supposed to be on the flight, but was heading home two days early because her daughter had a minor car accident and her son-in-law asked her to return to help with childcare.
“She said, ‘absolutely’, she got a ticket for that day and took that plane,” she said. “She really was this very sweet, kind, quiet lady. She left a big hole in our church community.”
Arthen said children at the church honored her friend’s memory with a service every 11 September, and this year’s mass would be especially poignant knowing that Keating had finally been formally identified.
Fitzgerald, meanwhile, was a young foreign currency trader working on the 94th floor of the south tower when United Airlines flight 175, also a Boeing 767 traveling from Boston to Los Angeles, with 51 passengers and nine crew members, struck at 9.03am.
Both towers burst into flames where the planes hit. Horrific scenes followed of survivors frantically escaping and first responders charging up flights of stairs to try to rescue others, while some leapt from high floors and a toxic cloud engulfed lower Manhattan. Then, not long after, both gigantic towers collapsed in seconds as their structures burned, melted and failed, sending the death toll exponentially higher. The site, known as Ground Zero, now the site of a museum and memorial, smoldered for weeks.
“We had forensic experts telling us two decades ago, ‘Really, you should not expect any DNA because of the physical act of the explosion itself, because of the heat,’” Keating’s son Paul, 61, told the New York Times.
“We’re talking about people putting in overtime 24 years later, for us. That’s the amazing, amazing part. You know they’re not going to stop until they’ve identified every person.”
Graham said enhancements in DNA technology, including automation allowing forensic scientists to more easily extract samples from bone fragments, had resulted in the identifications, along with prolonged outreach to victims’ families.
Keating’s brother and sister gave their own DNA samples three years ago after scientists identified what they believed was their mother’s hairbrush. According to the Times, researchers maintain a depository of 22,000 body parts retrieved from the rubble, with 1,100 victims still to be identified.
“Nearly 25 years after the disaster at the World Trade Center, our commitment to identify the missing and return them to their loved ones stands as strong as ever,” Graham said in a statement.
“Each new identification testifies to the promise of science and sustained outreach to families despite the passage of time. We continue this work as our way of honoring the lost.”
The names of Fitzgerald and Keating are among 2,983 inscribed on the 9/11 memorial in New York built on the footprints of the twin towers, also honoring those killed in attacks on the same day at the Pentagon and on another hijacked plane brought down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as it was headed for Washington DC. Six who died in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing are also remembered.
Eric Adams, New York’s mayor, promised work would continue to try to identify everybody who was killed.
“The pain of losing a loved one in the September 11 terror attacks echoes across the decades, but with these three new identifications we take a step forward in comforting the family members still aching from that day,” he said in a statement reported by the Times.
